Travel Quotes

A cold coming they had of it, at this time of the year; just, the worst time
of the year, to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in. The ways
deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio
brumali, the very dead of Winter.

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find
it.

George Moore (1852 - 1933)
Irish writer.
The Brook Kerith

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from
his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object
of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.

William Bradford (1590 - 1657)
English-born American religious leader and colonist.
History of Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!

Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
British writer and mathematician.
The Hunting of the Snark, "Fit the Second: The Bellman's Speech"

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)
Indian-born British writer and poet.
"The Story of the Gadsbys"

Emperors and kings, dukes and marquises, counts, knights, and townsfolk, and
all people who wish to know the various races of men and the peculiarities
of the various regions of the world, take this book and have it read to you.

Marco Polo (1254 - 1324)
Venetian merchant and traveler.Referring to his own book.
The Travels of Marco Polo

Ever let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)
British poet.
"Fancy"

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not
comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to
deserve the name.

In Rome you long for the country; in the country—oh inconstant!—you praise
the distant city to the stars.

Horace (65 - 8 BC)
Roman poet.
Satires

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas
now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

Robert Runcie (1921 - 2000)
British archbishop.
The Observer (London), "Sayings of the Week"

Isabella Bird comes closest to admitting a passion for travel for travel's
sake—her husband declared "I have only one formidable rival in Isabella's
affections and that is the high tableland of Central Asia".

Joanna Trollope (1943 - )
British writer.Isabella Bird (1831-1904), sent abroad for her health, became
an inveterate traveler.
Britannia's Daughters

It is my practice in travelling to make my arrangements very carefully, to
attend personally to every detail, and to give other people as little
trouble as possible.

It would be stretching the point to claim the Odyssey and the Book of Exodus
as early travel books; but they help to underline the fact that as long as
narrative literature has existed, it has taken the form of a journey, real
or imagined, or...partly reported and partly invented.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

Journey all over the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of
traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and
thirst.

No other form of transport in the rest of my life has ever come up to the
bliss of my pram.

Osbert Lancaster (1908 - 1986)
English cartoonist and writer.
The Observer (London), "Sayings of the Week"

O thievish Night
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars,
That Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps
With everlasting oil, to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?

John Milton (1608 - 1674)
English writer.
Comus

Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are
often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye...We put off from
time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing
when we please.

Pliny the Younger (62 - 113)
Roman politician and writer.

Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all
tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British
tourist.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process a new factor enters
and takes over...it has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.
A journey is a person in itself, no two are alike.

John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)
U.S. novelist.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America

One may know the world without going out of doors.
One may see the Way of Heaven without looking through the windows.
The further one goes, the less one knows.

Laozi (570? BC - 490? BC)
Chinese philosopher.The Daode Jing is an early Chinese Taoist text. While
attributed to Laozi, it probably dates from the 3rd century BC.
Daode Jing

Only a toothbrush is really indispensable: starting from the top this will
neaten the hair, remove scurf from the collar, clean the teeth, then the
fingernails—and then, if needs are dire, ream out between the toes and the
welts of the shoes.

George Courtauld (1938 - )
British civil servant and author.The lesson of traveling light, learned as a
Queen's Messenger.
The Travels of a Fat Bulldog

Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long
successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest.

J. M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)
British playwright and novelist.Peter's directions, navigating by the stars,
for how to get to Neverland.
Peter Pan

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst:
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

The British travel book, though, grew out of a particular set of historical
circumstances. It was an inevitable by-product of that lust for empire which
was the driving force behind the English Renaissance.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate.

Marcus Terentius Varro (116 - 27 BC)
Roman scholar.
On Agriculture

The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is
disaster.

Martha Gellhorn (1908 - 1998)
U.S. journalist and author.
Travels with Myself and Another

The sea voyage is more than an adventure; it is a rite of passage, as
decisive as a wedding. It marks the end of the old self and the birth of the
new.

The worst part of the climb, one slip, and a breathing, thinking, human
being would lie 3000 feet below, a shapeless, bloody heap!

Isabella Bishop (1831 - 1904)
British traveler and author.
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains

There are no formal constituents to define the travel book...The writer is
abroad—away from home, in that state of enhanced alertness that comes from
being uprooted from one's natural habitat.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as
I have found in traveling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to
shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

L. Frank Baum (1856 - 1919)
U.S. writer.Dorothy's remark to her dog Toto on first arriving in the land
of Oz, later made famous by the hugely successful musical film The Wizard of
Oz (1939), starring Judy Garland.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Time was when you could go on an outing to a town barely thirty miles
distant from your own and it was like visiting another country.

Beryl Bainbridge (1934 - )
British author and journalist.
Forever England North and South

To my taste there is nothing so fascinating as spending a night out in an
African forest or plantation; but I beg you to note I do not advise anyone
to follow the practice.

Mary Kingsley (1862 - 1900)
British explorer.
Travels in West Africa

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success
is to labour.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of
experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance
into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

While I was sleeping in a buffalo stable in Turkey two buffaloes quarrelled
and there was a terrible fight, in which the huge animals interlocked their
horns and broke them short off, bellowing fearfully.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of
experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance
into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's
sake. The great affair is to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)
Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet.
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, "Cheylard and Luc"

The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here
today—in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities
jumped—always somebody else's horizon!

Kenneth Grahame (1859 - 1932)
British banker and children's writer.Said by Mr. Toad about the motor car.
The Wind in the Willows

Isabella Bird comes closest to admitting a passion for travel for travel's
sake—her husband declared "I have only one formidable rival in Isabella's
affections and that is the high tableland of Central Asia".

Joanna Trollope (1943 - )
British writer.Isabella Bird (1831-1904), sent abroad for her health, became
an inveterate traveler.
Britannia's Daughters

After a distinctly uncomfortable introduction to the practice of travel, if
I could possibly help it, I would never travel disagreeably again.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)
Indian-born British writer and poet.
"The Story of the Gadsbys"

The fact that—these books—two novels, a book of travel, a biography, a work
of contemporary history—never got beyond the first ten thousand words was
testimony to the resilience of his character.

Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966)
British novelist.
Put Out More Flags

Now in Ireland, now in England, now in Normandy, he must fly rather than
travel by horse or ship.

Louis VII (1120? - 1180)
French monarch.Referring to Henry II.

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway, that's the best,
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Bobby Troup (1919 - 1999)
U.S. songwriter.
"Route 66"

Will anyone, a hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the
Victorians built, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings
they made to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons,
their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that satisfied
their souls?

H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)
British writer.
The New Machiavelli

The British navy always travels first class.

Lord Fisher (1841 - 1920)
Sinhalese-born British admiral, 1954.

Man as we know him is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and
a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

We keep the students within view of their parents; we save them many toils
and long foreign journeys; we protect them from robbers. They used to be
pillaged while traveling abroad; now, they may study at small cost and short
wayfaring, thanks to our liberality.

I travelled among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)
British poet.Referring to his travels in Germany (1798-1799), during which
the "Lucy poems" (of which this is one) were written.
Poems in Two Volumes, "I Travelled Among Unknown Men"

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train.

I believe that you can do anything. I believe you can fly and I believe in
astral travel because, if I thought I was just going to walk around this
place for the next fifty years, I don't think I could exist.

There is a ghost
That eats handkerchiefs;
It keeps you company
On all your travels.

Christian Morgenstern (1871 - 1914)
German poet.
"Gespenst"

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find
it.

George Moore (1852 - 1933)
Irish writer.
The Brook Kerith

In all my travels I never met with any one Scotchman but what was a man of
sense. I believe everybody of that country that has any, leaves it as fast
as they can.

Francis Lockier (1667 - 1740)
British writer and priest.

Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face.

Juvenal (65? - 128?)
Roman poet.
Satires

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from
his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object
of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as
I have found in traveling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to
shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

Not bound to swear allegiance to any master, wherever the wind takes me I
travel as a visitor.

Horace (65 - 8 BC)
Roman poet.Nullius in verba is the motto of the Royal Society.
Epistles

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly:
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at "The Travellers' Rest".

As an English man does not travel to see English men, I retired to my room.

Laurence Sterne (1713 - 1768)
Irish-born British writer and clergyman.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "In the Desobligeant"

Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are
often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye...We put off from
time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing
when we please.

Pliny the Younger (62 - 113)
Roman politician and writer.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of
gold…That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild
surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)
British poet.George Chapman, the translator of Homer's Iliad, was a
contemporary of Shakespeare's. In fact, Balboa, not Cortez, was the first
European to see the Pacific from Darien in Panama.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.

George Eliot (1819 - 1880)
British novelist.
Middlemarch

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building
here after seeing Italy.

Fanny Burney (1752 - 1840)
British novelist and diarist.
Cecilia

Tho' thou art worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,
The lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

William Blake (1757 - 1827)
British poet, painter, engraver, and mystic.
The Gates of Paradise

A travel book...is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is
its own excuse for the gathering up and the going.

Paul Theroux (1941 - )
U.S. writer.
The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil, the way it travels
from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating,
heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the
cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick in
everything it does, endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, a lake
sometimes.

Jane Smiley (1949 - )
U.S. novelist and short-story writer.Jane Smiley won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize
in fiction for A Thousand Acres.
A Thousand Acres

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have
remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my
achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far
from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am
bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person
I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all
appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967 - )
U.S. writer.Jumpa Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
Interpreter of Maladies.
Interpreter of Maladies, “The Third and Final Continent”

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths rather than travel
the worn paths of accepted success.

Attributed to John D. Rockefeller (1839 - 1937)
U.S. industrialist and philanthropist.

Over them wander the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck;
Over them wander the wolves, and herds of riderless horses;
Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary with travel.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)
U.S. poet.Referring to the North American prairies.
Evangeline

Oh Time, oh Still and Now,
pregnant with things impending.
You travel the cold path with me,
arousing restlessness and hope.

The town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, lies on the shore against Adams
Hill...the highway aims for the lake...bringing the traveler in on Main
Street toward the town's one traffic light, which is almost always green.

I met a traveler from Arkansas
Who boasted of his state as beautiful
for diamonds and apples.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
U.S. poet.
New Hampshire, "New Hampshire"

At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant
damage...but the faster you go, the worse it is...So 60,000 kilometers per
second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.

The natural tenderness and delicacy of our constitution, added to the many
dangers we are subject to from your sex, renders it almost impossible for a
single lady to travel without injury to her character.

Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
U.S. feminist.
Letter to Isaac Smith, Jr.

Technology travels with people. You can't just throw it over the wall and,
because it's such a good idea, expect another engineering group to simply
pick it up and run with it.

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

Woody Allen (1935 - )
U.S. film actor and director.
Take the Money and Run

But the horses had burst before her. In a sort of lightning of knowledge
their movement travelled through her, the quiver and strain and thrust of
their powerful flanks, as they burst before her and drew on, beyond. She
knew they had not gone, she knew they awaited her still.

D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)
British writer.
The Rainbow

"Have I behaved badly?" asked Pippi..."You understand, ma'am, that when your
mother is an angel and your father a Cannibal King, and you've travelled all
your life on the seas, you don't really know how you oughter behave in a
school."

Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, D.D., dean of this cathedral, where
burning indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveller, and
imitate if you can a man who was an undaunted champion of liberty.

Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745)
Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman.Jonathan Swift's epitaph, written by
himself, on his tomb in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
Epitaph

Was he a malignant creature whose perverted sense of humour delighted to
send travellers astray? Was he merely half-witted? Probably not: the Welsh
are quite incapable of directing one anywhere.

John Moore (1907 - 1967)
British travel writer.Referring to getting lost after consulting a man
outside Llangurig, Wales.
Tramping Through Wales, "Adventures in the South"

For man's Karma travels with him, like his shadow. Indeed it is his shadow,
for it has been said, "Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is
dark."

The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when
word of the killings on Cielo Drive traveled like bushfire through the
community...The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Joan Didion (1934 - )
U.S. journalist and writer.Referring to the murders of Sharon Tate and
others committed by Charles Manson and his followers.
The White Album, "The White Album"

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster
Public Libraries: and I have never said sir
to anyone since I was seventeen years old.

Peter Porter (1929 - )
Australian-born British poet and critic.The first line alludes to John
Keats's sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816).
The Last of England, "The Sanitized Sonnets: 4"

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door.

Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1956)
British poet and novelist.
The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare, "The Listeners"

This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

Keith Douglas (1920 - 1944)
British poet.
"How to Kill"

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece
of good bread.

Gender often forms a bond between women travellers. Women confide in other
women.

Mary Morris (1947 - )
U.S. writer.
Virago Book of Women Travellers

A silk American flag which Mrs. Peary gave me fifteen years ago...has done
more traveling in high latitudes than any other ever made. I carried it
wrapped about my body on every one of my expeditions northward.

Robert Edwin Peary (1856 - 1920)
U.S. explorer.
The North Pole

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography
to oblivion.

Paul Theroux (1941 - )
U.S. writer.
The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

John Berryman (1914 - 1972)
U.S. poet.
Poems, "A Point of Age"

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!

Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
British writer and mathematician.
The Hunting of the Snark, "Fit the Second: The Bellman's Speech"

FIRST MURDERERThe west yet glimmers with some streaks of day:
Now spurs the lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn.

O thievish Night
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars,
That Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps
With everlasting oil, to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?

John Milton (1608 - 1674)
English writer.
Comus

The traveler need have no scruple in limiting his donations to the smallest
possible sums, as liberality frequently becomes a source of annoyance and
embarrassment.

There are no formal constituents to define the travel book...The writer is
abroad—away from home, in that state of enhanced alertness that comes from
being uprooted from one's natural habitat.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

It would be stretching the point to claim the Odyssey and the Book of Exodus
as early travel books; but they help to underline the fact that as long as
narrative literature has existed, it has taken the form of a journey, real
or imagined, or...partly reported and partly invented.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

In America, there are two classes of travel—first class, and with children.

The British travel book, though, grew out of a particular set of historical
circumstances. It was an inevitable by-product of that lust for empire which
was the driving force behind the English Renaissance.

Jonathan Raban (1942 - )
British author.

Mr. Mandela has walked a long road and now stands at the top of the hill. A
traveller would sit down and admire the view. But a man of destiny knows
that beyond this hill lies another and another. The journey is never
complete.

Are there still virgins? One is tempted to answer no. There are only girls
who have not yet crossed the line, because they want to preserve their
market value...Call them virgins if you wish, these travelers in transit.

And the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country
know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms,
dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast.

William Bradford (1590 - 1657)
English-born American religious leader and colonist.
History of Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the
prayers of the church, to preserve all that travel by land, or by water.

No man can be a Politician, except he be first an Historian or a Traveller;
(for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no Politician).

James Harrington (1611 - 1677)
English political theorist.
The Commonwealth of Oceana

She was seen as obstinate, unassimilable, refusing to join groups of people
like herself for purposes of travel or instruction, in which activities she
might be supposed to involve herself honourably, thus leaving the world with
no obligations towards her.